THE CLOCK OF GOD, Part 6,THE LANGUAGE OF GOD

Goodnews Christian Ministry

"Yes, certainly with stammering lips
and in a foreign language, he will talk to this nation. ---Isaiah 28:11

CHAPTER 21

Removing the Veil

"I have been telling you all this in metaphors; the
hour is coming when I shall no longer speak to you in metaphors; but will
tell you about the Father in plain words." John 16:25

_____________

God has hidden the mysteries of heaven behind a divine cloak.
The seven seals which form this veil are composed of metaphor and for many
centuries they effectively blocked every person on earth from seeing clearly
the hidden truths of heaven. "There are many prophets and holy
men who longed to see what you see and never saw it." (Mt.13:17).

Perhaps the most important difference between early Christians and the
ruling aristocracy of Judea was the way in which each interpreted the word
of God. To many Jews, the Torah was literal. They saw no secondary meaning
hidden behind its words.

Christians, on the other hand, because they had been instructed by Jesus
in the symbolism of its verses, saw these books veiled in metaphor -- their
true meaning hidden in a spiritual language structured in the design of
God.

When John in his vision was taken by the angel into heaven he saw God there,
sitting on a great throne and holding in His hand the Bible. "I
saw that in the right hand of the One sitting on the throne there was a
scroll that had writing on back and front and was sealed with seven seals."
(Rv.5:1).

In his vision John was shown that among all the angels and men of heaven
or earth there was only one person worthy enough to break the seven seals
on this book: "...the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David,
has triumphed, and he will open the scroll and the seven seals of it."
(Rv.5:5).

The Lion of the tribe of Judah -- the key that unlocks the scriptures --
is Jesus Christ. "You are worthy to take the scroll and break the
seals of it, because you were sacrificed, and with your blood you bought
men for God of every race, language, people and nation..." (Rv.5:9).

Opening its metaphoric curtain, Jesus released into the world the hidden
language of God -- all the secret instruction that unlocks the gate of
heaven. Yet, in doing so, he kept the screen guarding His message intact.

He did this by talking to the people only in parables: "In all
this Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables; indeed, he would never speak
to them except in parables. This was to fulfill the prophecy: 'I will speak
to you in parables and expound things hidden since the foundation of the
world." (Mt.13:34-35). This was so that the Holy Spirit could
distribute the invisible secrets of God selectively.

"The mysteries of the kingdom of heaven are revealed to you, but
they are not revealed to them. For anyone who has will be given more, and
he will have more than enough; but from anyone who has not, even what he
has will be taken away." (Mt.13:11-12).

It was because of the people's wickedness that God made His message a mystery.
His words hold the secret to eternal life -- something the wicked cannot
experience, so only those with ears to hear have been given access to their
hidden meaning.

The idea that scripture could have a spiritual dimension was clear even
to the writers of the Old Testament. The Book of Proverbs, for instance,
opens with these words: "Proverbs...for understanding words of
deep meaning...for perceiving the meaning of proverbs and obscure sayings...
the sayings of the sages and their riddles..." (Prov.1:1-6).

While their ancestors may have seen obscure sayings in the Bible, orthodox
Jews today do not talk about the scriptures in such terms. In Christ's
day, wide-spread disagreement raged among the leaders in Jerusalem about
the nature of God and His impact on men.

In those days Jewish scholars searched the scriptures for proofs of their
various beliefs. We can see this in the Gospel's accounts, and especially
in the widely disparate views of the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes.

The Sadducees were more like the Jews of today, but the Pharisees believed
in angels and looked forward to resurrection -- ideas that are not shared
by most modern Jews.

The Essenes, on the other hand, seemed to follow a prophet-oriented Judaism
that closely paralleled the philosophy of the Maccabean period. They seemed
to pattern themselves after the Hassidean freedom fighter's who successfully
liberated Judea from the forces of Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

The unification of Jewish theology occurred soon after Jesus appeared and
seems to have been a response to His coming. And once it had been defined,
Jewish leaders rejected the idea of a scripture underlain with symbolic
hidden meanings.

By blocking such metaphoric interpretation, it became impossible for Jewish
scholars to see Jesus Christ. Paul called this scriptural cloud a veil
and said that it had been divinely placed, "...indeed, to this
very day, that same veil is still there whenever the old Covenant is being
read, a veil never lifted, since Christ alone can remove it."
(2 Cor.3:14).

This divine seal not only clouds Jewish minds, it covers the vision of
others as well. In fact, Jesus revealed that even the brightest of scholars
would be blinded by the secrets of God's mysteries: "I bless you,
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned
and clever and revealing them to mere children instead." (Lk.10:21).

The only people able to understand the metaphors of God are the children
of God. To all others, there is nothing but the veil -- a veil that can
be removed only through the power of the Holy Spirit.

There is a significant mystery here. How God's secrets could be misinterpreted
by scholars but understood by people without any education seems incomprehensible.
"As your word unfolds, it gives light, and the simple understand."
(Ps.119:130).

This defies all logic.

Yet this paradox is locked in the concept and function of the Holy Spirit.
The understanding of the simple is something which can only come through
the power and guidance of the Spirit of God.

When he spoke to His apostles Jesus anticipated this divine, invisible
instruction. "The hour is coming when I shall no longer speak to
you in metaphors but tell you about the Father in plain words."
(Jn.16:25). "I shall ask the Father, and he will give you another
Advocate to be with you forever, that Spirit of truth whom the world can
never receive since it neither sees nor knows him; but you know him, because
he is with you, he is in you." (Jn.14:16-17).

But to those outside of God Jesus said, "Do you know why you cannot
take in what I say? It is because you are unable to understand my language.
That is because the devil is your father and you prefer to do what your
father wants." (Jn.8:43-47).

The entire Bible, new and old Testament alike, is written in this hidden
tongue. "Elijah has come already and they did not recognize him..."
(Mt.17:12). "It was the stone rejected by the builders that became
the keystone..." (Ps.118:22). "If David calls him Lord,
then how can he be his son?" (Mt.22:41-45). "I am going
to strike the shepherd so that the sheep may be scattered." (Zech.13:7).

Understanding the secret meaning behind these words is at the very core
of hearing God. This is why Jesus was so insistent with his apostles that
they decipher his words, and not just listen to the literal stories that
encapsulated what He had to say.

"If you do not understand this parable", he once asked
them, "how then will you understand any of the parables?"
(Mk.4:13-14). Deciphering scripture requires an understanding of spiritual
language -- the hidden tongue that lies just beneath its surface.

The Bible is written in two languages simultaneously -- narrative and poetic.
Narrative is like the text caption below a picture and poetic is the picture
itself.

Poetic language is deeply symbolic and filled with metaphor. Through it,
one word can be transposed in the mind to conjure up a sweeping variety
of meanings.

Narrative is just the opposite. Meant to be a language of precision, it
demands exact meaning from its vocabulary.

Because precise language requires precise definition, narrative takes a
lot of words to say very little. That is why we say 'one picture is worth
a thousand words'. If no words are available to describe an idea in narrative
language, the idea cannot be expressed. Worse, until it can be precisely
described, the idea does not even exist.

Communication and thought, therefore, are intimately related. These two
forms of thinking have recently been linked to the right and left sides
of the brain, showing that each is processed by the mind in a completely
different way. Narrative has become the fundamental form of expression
in the western world because of its precise way of denoting ideas.

One of the most important Greek influences in the world was the shift to
narrative as the basis for communicative language. Up to that time, especially
in the east, people communicated in both forms -- in both narrative and
poetic -- so that the two ways of speaking and thinking were interchangeable.

Consequently language and thought were often mystical and arbitrary. Aristotle
changed all that. Given the Greek preoccupation with the absolutes of science
and philosophy, Aristotle decreed that the basis for communication be narrative,
and everyone since then has agreed with him.

The epitome of narrative language is law. As its ultimate expression, law
also shows us narrative's most glaring problems. Meant for precision, it
can work just the opposite. Simple contracts work well in law, but complex
ones are often a disaster. Narrative breaks down, even among the experts,
when it comes to complex or abstract ideas.

It is because of this breakdown that Einstein had to use poetic thought
in order to come to his revelations about space and the universe. He thought
in terms of elevators and freight trains, and transposed what he saw in
these to outer space. In doing this, he discovered there were similarities
between the two which matched.

In the freedom of poetic thought he could extrapolate these similarities
and see new things beyond them never dreamed of before -- his mind unfettered
by the restrictions of past definition.

To explain his ideas to an academic world which thought in narrative however,
he had to redefine his ideas back into the kind of prose his audience could
understand. He did this through the intermediary of mathematics -- the
ultimate expression of precision in a world which God made "according
to measure, number and weight".

Those who think only in narrative terms look at Einstein and say, 'How
did he ever think of those things?' Freed from the jail of a defined narrative,
he entered a process of thinking which could roam about freely outside
of vocabulary.

Because poetic language and thinking have no precise definitions, the mind
is free to contemplate an infinite variety of meanings. This expands interpretation
to the borders of imagination, allowing the mind to explore options which
are virtually unlimited. Precision is sacrificed for scope. And definition
for creativity and understanding. This makes poetic a language of discovery.
The two languages used together lead to deeper understanding.

The reason why this works is because God has replicated creation over and
over again using similar processes, creating dualisms to all things. Einstein
proved that this dualism extends to the borders of the universe. God obviously
did this on purpose so that we could see one thing, and through it, understand
in it many other things as well -- because all of it is pointing to one
thing alone -- Jesus Christ. When we say that history repeats itself, we
are implying that the same processes apply even to human behavior.

The Holy Spirit has used metaphoric dualism as a basis for all the words
of prophecy. That is why an understanding of this process and the language
used to describe it are so essential in removing the veil which now hides
God's prophecy from our minds. Daniel, for instance, could describe an
event that occurred 2300 years ago and have us see in it the mirror image
of a sacrilege that still lies in the future.

God has created a world in which the patterns keep repeating because we
live in a place where two opposite spirits are warring for our soul. Satan
does not change and neither does God, and so the conflict between them
which is carried out in our own flesh always impacts in the same way.

Sin always leads to catastrophe. When the experts warn that 'the Big One'
is coming, most people look to the San Andreas fault, but we can also use
the same expression for Armageddon. This kind of poetic dualism can be
seen in all things because sin is bringing the world to an end. Disaster
has an ultimate focus -- so all the catastrophe's are related. They tell
us that God is near -- at the very door.

Despite the drawbacks to narrative, and the need for poetic thought to
counterbalance it, western society has virtually drummed poetic language
out of existence. Our world has become too disciplined to tolerate any
imprecision in thought or communication, even for creative purposes.

In today's format every concept must be narrowly defined. We can see this
in a simple example. The Declaration of Independence says that 'all men
are created equal'. This, of course, is a poetic expression meant to include
all mankind, but in narrative thinking it has excluded women and children.
"What about us?", they ask.

Because we have excluded it from our minds and communication, poetic language
is no longer understood or tolerated by much of the population -- showing
that the part of the brain which deals in this kind of thought has been
shut down in many people. That is why we have seen these kind of questions
pop up in recent years. Especially in relation to the Bible -- a book filled
with poetic language.

When God gave Moses authority to write the Bible, there were no restrictions
governing the way ideas should be expressed. Consequently, the Bible was
produced in both narrative and poetic language simultaneously. The easiest
way to see this is in scripture's liberal use of metaphor -- all the parables,
for instance.

In eastern religions, poetic language is known as mysticism, but in Christianity
it's mystery has been solved and so we refer to the Bible's poetic language
as spiritual, not mystical. Because the Bible is written in two kinds of
language, it's concepts must be understood in both ways.

The Jews see Moses in the strict definitions of narrative law, but God
has interpreted that law in poetic terms: Jesus was the underlying focus
of the Old Testament from the beginning as far as God was concerned. Yet
this was a truth that could only be seen poetically. The fact that God
had hidden a poetic language even in the narrative of Moses shows that
not just the parables, but every word in the Bible must be understood both
literally and metaphorically.

These two types of language, narrative and poetic, are interwoven together
so that they envelope every sentence in the Bible. In this way the Holy
Spirit has combined both precision and infinite thought together in the
one document.

God has allowed scripture to be fulfilled both ways, but His primary objective
was that it be understood poetically (spiritually). That is because it
is not the Bible itself that instructs us, but God. The Holy Spirit is
our teacher and the Holy Spirit simply uses the words in the Bible to show
us the ultimate truths about God.

Therefore it is not the writer's intention that is the primary object of
the literature, it is the message that God has hidden for us inside the
writer's description that is of paramount importance -- a message that
can only be understood by means of the Spirit.

Paul was showing us our need to see God in poetic terms rather than in
the narrative of the world when he said, "We teach, not in the
way that human philosophy is taught, but in the way that the Spirit teaches
us: we teach spiritual things spiritually. An unspiritual person is one
who does not accept anything of the Spirit of God: he sees it all as nonsense;
it is beyond his understanding because it can only be understood by means
of the Spirit." (1 Cor.2:13-14).

God is unseen and cannot be proved. Neither can heaven nor hell. No one
has seen a soul and no one can prove its existence. Even the angels are
invisible to us. The only way we can know that any of these things exist
is through poetic thought. Faith, then, is the ability to see spiritual
things spiritually.

Since we tend to interpret the Bible in strict narrative terms (law), we
usually see God as a severe judge, holding a Damascus sword, and just waiting
for us to make a single small mistake so that He can slice off our heads.
Theology, of course, as our narrative definition of the Bible, defines
the mistake that God seems to be looking for. Each person's narrative defining
something different.

This is why we have so many diverse theologies on earth forming all the
various churches. Each of them are convinced that God wants us to obey
an array of man-made rules, most of which were expressed in one way or
another in the narrative of Moses. They all say they are structured in
the mercy of Jesus Christ, yet they all tie strict and uncompromising man-made
narratives to his Gospel -- narratives ranging from magic incantations
to complex human regulations.

This obsession with their own legality is why all the various churches
are so intolerant of each other. It not only explains why Mormons and Protestants
and Catholics cannot interact, but why all of these major divisions have
produced a vast array of warring subsets within themselves. Each of them
utterly convinced that their own legal interpretation of scripture is the
correct one and that all the others are wrong -- and therefore, probably
fatal.

This occurs because we think only in narrative terms -- in the terms of
this world's language.

The 'creeds' of our various churches are the ultimate examples of the way
in which our theologians transpose Christ's poetic expressions into narrative.
For this reason, law and faith always go together. God intended it this
way because both languages in the Bible are true.

Yet God has tempered the inflexibility of the Law with mercy -- transforming
it from letter to spirit. In this transformation, the spirit of the law
became the higher authority. Unable to fathom the poetic, it is inconceivable
for us to come to grips with a God who has developed a sliding scale --
to a God who said, for instance, "To him whom more is given, more
will be expected". (Lk.12:48).

This kind of variable judgement is not acceptable in a contemporary human
court where we say 'ignorance of the law is no excuse'. As a result, these
two languages represent a collision between two entirely different ways
of thinking. That is what happens whenever God comes into contact with
man.

What Jesus' words show is that God is not going to judge us on our own
narrative terms. He does not care whether we go to church on Saturday or
Sunday or even Wednesday for that matter. He does not care whether we are
Protestant or Catholic or Mormon or fat or thin or black or white. He does
not care whether we eat meat or dance or wear beads. God wants us to be
holy -- simply to put Christ's commandments into practice in our own lives.

We can see this in the poetic expression of Jesus, but it is invisible
to us in the strict legal narrative of Moses. God keeps the Law of Moses
because He is righteous, and no one who is righteous breaks the law, but
He has given up His Son to a death on the cross so that our sins with respect
to that Law could all be forgiven. In that one instant, he removed us from
the Law and made us responsible to Him only in terms of our obedience and
faith to Jesus Christ.

The poetic concept of this is almost beyond our prosaic mind to grasp.
We still think of God in the simplistic precision of man-made restrictions
-- the kind of precision that rules our vocabulary and thinking. That is
why we step right over the top of Jesus and go on to look for the 'true'
church -- the perfect creed -- which we are sure lies just over the next
horizon.

Since narrative operates only in absolutes, when the Bible is viewed in
that language alone, it has no component except the exact meaning of the
vocabulary itself. We call this absolute, the 'letter of the law'. It's
opposite poetic component is the 'spirit of the law'. The spirit of the
law has no meaning in a contemporary courtroom where only narrative thinking
exists. That is because narrative thought is always empirical. A lawyer
has no time for what is 'right' or what is 'true', only for what can be
proved.

Scholarship and science are the same, existence only relates to what can
be seen, proved and described. The problem is, God has many things to reveal
to us which do not fit into any of these categories. Most of God's creation
is invisible, unknown, cannot be proved and no words exist to describe
it. Therefore there is no way for Him to speak to us on the literary terms
we have set.

By blocking poetic expression -- the vocabulary of the Spirit -- we have
made language choices which lock us into a legalese which God has great
difficulty penetrating. The only way He can communicate ideas about His
invisible and spiritual world is through a spiritual language which most
of us have rejected and therefore cannot speak or understand. "Do
you know why you cannot take in what I say? It is because you are unable
to understand my language." (Jn.8:43). This is why a barrier exists
between mankind and God.

And even if we did have a vocabulary for all the ideas God wants to express
to us, it would take so many words to define these ideas that we would
be left, not with a Bible, but with an entire encyclopedia. As John said,
"The world itself, I suppose, would not be enough to hold all the
books which would have to be written." (Jn.21:25).

By speaking to us in poetic terms, God has used an economy of language
to bring many different concepts into a single form which could unfold
as our understanding grows -- ideas that would have been impossible for
God to divulge in pure narrative terms.

Precise definition does not lend itself to an unfolding revelation. That
is because the descriptive narrative has to be entirely re-written with
each new discovery. This explains why the schools use new textbooks every
year. But we cannot go back and re-write the Bible. Everything that God
needed to say to us, had to exist in one form from the beginning.

This is a fundamental reason why God structured the Bible in the fluidity
of poetic terms. As our understanding of the world evolves, so must our
perception of scripture. That is why Jesus told his disciples that he had
many more things to tell them which they were not yet prepared to hear.
(Jn.16:12).

When we view the scriptures only in its narrative language, deeper understanding
is lost and an unfolding revelation is impossible. When we tie our religious
definitions to our knowledge of this world, we cannot tolerate scientific
discoveries, or any other contrary opinions for that matter, to cloud these
definitions.

Because our knowledge of this world is going to change, any definitions
we tie to it must change as well. Cemented in strict and uncompromising
definitions, the whole narrative structure is completely interdependent.
Any slight change makes the whole document invalid -- requiring that we
re-write the entire book from scratch.

This is why the Roman hierarchy was so intolerant of Keppler and Copernicus
when they looked out into space and saw that the earth revolved around
the sun. We would think today, 'who cares?', but that one discovery blew
an entire theological narrative. It meant that a whole Vatican theology
had to be re-written -- right down to the core.

This is what happens to us when we compartmentalize God and try to make
Him fit into our faulty narrative knowledge. Our entire faith can be shattered
in a single discovery. This is why when Jesus appeared to Cleopas on the
road from Jerusalem, he explained the second language of scripture to him
-- the hidden language behind the narrative.

The difference between these two languages can be seen in a simple example.
In one language the Bible says '70 years', a fixed definition which has
been precisely defined for us by astronomers and scientists, but in another
it says 'a day can be like a thousand years', and that erases the fixed
definition and brings us to poetic interpretation. It brings us to the
second language.

We can see exactly the same process again today with the discovery of the
process of evolution. An entire wing of the Christian church is up in arms
over this concept because it does not fit into their narrative perception
of the world. They have taken the poetic expressions of the Old Testament
and interpreted them in a strict legal narrative little different from
what Roman theologians had done before the telescope was invented -- tying
their belief in God to a single point in the world's unfolding knowledge.

And again, just as the discoveries of Keppler and Copernicus did before
him, Darwin's findings have altered the world's knowledge. And again like
Keppler and Copernicus, it has done so in such a way that appears to contradict
religious traditions born out of literal interpretations of the Old Testament.
Yet the One who made creation also guided scripture, so Darwin had no way
of discovering a world that proved the Bible wrong. Instead, Darwin's findings
show that those who interpreted scripture in narrative terms alone were
dealing with only a fraction of God's message.

Had they been listening, they would have known that two thousand years
ago Jesus described Darwin's revelation in spiritual terms. In his parable
Jesus said that the kingdom of God was like the angels throwing a net into
the sea and bringing in a catch of all kinds. When it was full, the angels
sat on the bank and sorted through it, keeping the good and throwing the
bad away.

This represents survival of the fittest (faithful) by supernatural selection.
It is God's way of paraphrasing Darwin, showing that what Darwin actually
discovered was a dualism that proved the truth of Christ -- it shows that
God made this world in such a way that it would point to the Gospel's truth
on every level. All Darwin discovered was the earthly equivalent of God's
own rules.

The same kind of dualism can be seen in Keppler's discovery as well. This
world revolves around the sun because we revolve around the Son of God.
Man is not the center of the universe, God is. Because we have made ourselves
the center, we have reversed reality.

That is why so many of us tend to see God in anthropomorphic terms -- with
hands and legs and arms and such. The Bible said that God made man in His
own image and instead of comprehending that in poetic terms, we switch
it into narrative and make God into our image. So instead of seeing ourselves
in the image of God, we make God into a man. This turns it upside down
and locks us into a theological narrative which is not true and never was
true.

These are spiritual images that can only be seen by means of poetic thought.
When we keep going back to viewing the Bible only in the strict and uncompromising
terms of narrative language, we instill into it our own biases and lock
ourselves out of seeing the larger truths behind its words.

Jesus tried to tell us this when he implored his apostles to try harder
to understand the hidden meanings behind his parables. (Mk.4:14). His metaphors
held the key to eternal life and he was trying to tell the people who listened
to him that they must learn to understand his language in terms of its
poetic (spiritual) meaning. Once they did that, the veil of scripture would
be removed and the hidden meanings of the entire Bible would be opened
to them.

God is above the universe and beyond even what lies behind it. We can see
this in the words of John: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.
The first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now and there was
no longer any sea. I saw the holy city, and the new Jerusalem, coming down
from God out of heaven..." (Rv.21:1-2).

Through poetic understanding we can see God's invisible kingdom in a place
that lies even beyond the sky -- far beyond anything our telescopes can
probe. This leads to concepts which are incomprehensible to narrative thought
-- concepts that can only be seen through metaphor -- and it means that
the future can never leave Jesus behind, because whatever science discovers,
Jesus made.

It does not take a genius to listen or think in the poetic. It doesn't
even take a lot of education. Jesus proved this with his parables -- parables
that small children could understand. God spoke easily to those who did
not meet this world's criteria for intellect. In fact as we have seen,
it was the educated who were misled by these parables, not the children.

When Jesus described God's process of creating the world and mankind, he
said, "How it came to be no one knows. First came the shoot, then
the ear, and then the corn in the ear." (Mk.4:26-29). In these
words, Jesus illustrates God's prudence of language, as He leads us past
what is not important and focuses our attention, instead, on what is important.
How it came to be is not important. It is the end of things that holds
all the meaning.

The entire creation was formed to lead first to Jesus, and then to judgement.
When the time was appropriate -- when the corn appeared in the ear -- Jesus
suddenly came to earth to offer mankind reconciliation with God before
the judgement could destroy us.

In his reconciliation, Jesus removed us from man's terms and put us squarely
before God alone. The judgement will be entirely spiritual. Theology will
not be involved. Only the spirit of the law will matter. The terms of God's
judgement will be based entirely on the Gospel Jesus preached. (Jn.12:47-48).
And this is the paradox. There is a narrative for judgement, but it is
God's narrative, not man's.